| Scriptures: | I Corinthians 1:18-25 Mark 9:30-37 |
Everybody loves a clown. Those of you who have been around here for our past humor Sundays really enjoy Jim when he dresses up in his clown outfit, offering balloons along with a big grin. Gives us a lift, right? Puts a bit of a spring in our step.
Even sad clowns can be funny and serve a purpose. Probably the greatest of these sad clowns was Emmett Kelly, whose clown make-up always included down-turned lips and sad-looking eyes, and whose character was known as Weary Willie. In an article in last week’s Sports Illustrated which details how it wasn’t really Walter O’Malley that made the Dodgers leave Brooklyn but rather Robert Moses who drove them out, it is noted that for the 1957 season O’Malley hired Kelly to perform at Dodger games at Ebbets Field to distract the crowd from their anxieties about a possible move for the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. As the article notes, “…Kelly’s character never smiled….. He made people laugh at their predicaments, which was perfect for Brooklyn.”
Why do even sad clowns make us laugh at our predicaments? Because part of being a clown is to appear to be – or in fact to be – foolish. And being able to see the foolishness in others makes us probably first of all feel a bit superior…but then ultimately we recognize that same foolishness in ourselves. When confronted with all that the world throws at us – especially in times of deep recession like these with all of the economic pain around us – maybe a little more foolishness is being called for.
There’s a long history of clowns in Christianity. I became aware years ago of a troupe called “The Company of Holy Fools”, but they must not be around anymore, because my Internet search couldn’t turn anything up about them. According to historical references, Christian clowns are nothing new. They can be traced to the early days of the church, and Philemon was the first noted one. He was executed by Diocletian, the Roman emperor, for not taking the tyrant's anti-Christian reign very seriously. Maybe not a wise thing to do in the eyes of an emperor, but certainly consonant with Paul’s, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” ''The Clown Ministry Handbook'' says that Christian clowns were the forerunners of the better-known court jesters.
The two characters in Godspell that we just heard are doing an old vaudeville, soft-shoe routine. The first singer is John the Baptist who has already told us to “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord”. He gradually morphs into Judas by the end of the musical, and his message here is certainly dour and glum: “When you feel sad or under a curse, your life is bad, your prospects are worse….. Temples are graying, and teeth are decaying, and creditors weighing your purse….. You’d think that Job had nothing on you.”
When he gets to his climactic line: “When you get to heaven you’ll be blessed; yes, it’s all for the best,” this is an example of what an earlier generation called “pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die” religion – that is, don’t worry about all your earthly woes because everything will be all right when you pass through those Pearly Gates. But Jesus – in clown outfit and still in the vaudeville, soft-shoe mode – mocks this approach with a counterpoint that gets faster and faster as he talks about life in this world – “they can’t take it with them…who is the land for, the sun and the sand for” – yes, this is truly what is all for the best: the time and the place that we are in right now – what Paul Tillich liked to call “the eternal now”.
But the question becomes: how? How do we live through these difficult times with a firm belief that a loving God still has our back? Some have found the answer to that question by becoming a holy fool.
Again, as with clowns the church has a rich tradition that we can trace back to the model of the holy fool. Fascinatingly, one branch of Christendom where this is especially prominent is the Russian Orthodox Church – not exactly a denomination that we associate with hilarity. Holy foolishness for Christ's sake is a peculiar form of Eastern Orthodox asceticism, which is marked by the subversive behavior of its practitioners who feign madness in order to provide the public with spiritual guidance and yet not be praised for their saintliness. It is, in other words, a way of practicing a particular form of humility. A book from the Holy Trinity Monastery, entitled The Law of God, explains it this way:
“One form of the ascetic Christian life is called foolishness for the sake of Christ. The fool-for-Christ set for himself the task of battling within himself the root of all sin, pride. In order to accomplish this he took on an unusual style of life, appearing as someone bereft of his mental faculties, thus bringing upon himself the ridicule of others. In addition he exposed the evil in the world through metaphorical and symbolic words and actions. He took this ascetic endeavor upon himself in order to humble himself and to also more effectively influence others, since most people respond to the usual ordinary sermon with indifference [OK, sound a bit familiar? That comment kinda stung a little bit.]. The spiritual feat of foolishness for Christ was especially widespread in Russia.”
Perhaps most importantly for our purposes today, according to Svetlana Kobets,”Unlike other ascetics, the fool in Christ does not renounce the profane world. … Instead of going into hermetic or monastic seclusion he becomes a part of secular life.” He enters the world and lives for its sake. Here’s one example from the man called “the patron saint of holy fools”: St. Simeon Salos of Emresa. He retreated to the Syrian desert in the 6th century to devote his life to prayer, living on nothing but lentils. A few decades later, Simeon returned to town a completely different man. He tied a dead dog to his waist and entered town dragging the carcass. Simeon would throw nuts at the priests during the worship service and publicly ate sausage on Good Friday. The seemingly nutty monk also helped people in the town, though never when someone else might notice and never taking credit. Simeon’s saintly deeds were done away from the spotlight. No one could dispute that Simeon was a holy person, even the priests he pelted with nuts on Sunday. Simeon poked fun at every attempt people made to feel themselves “holier than thou.”
The foolishness that Paul is talking about to the Corinthians is the foolishness of the cross. “We proclaim Christ crucified,” Paul says here and on more than one occasion. In the paragraph after the one we read for our text Paul makes clear what he means by preaching Christ crucified: “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world…to reduce to nothing things that are.” (vss. 27-28) The cross – being crucified as a criminal – is about as foolish as you can get if you want to save a whole world. As the Rev. Adrian Dielman reminds us: “[We have] forgotten how cruel and hideous crucifixion really was. We have perhaps unwisely and sometimes unconsciously glamorized the cross. Jewelry and steeple alike are often ornamental and attractive but carry nothing of the real story of the crucifixion. It was the most painful method of public death in the first century….. Historians remind us that even the soldiers could not get used to the horrible sight, and often took strong drink to numb their senses.” This beautiful large cross that adorns our sanctuary or the pretty blue one I showed to the kids covers up what was really done to Jesus. The wisdom of the world, Paul is saying, is that tyrants will use power and the threat of repression and executions in order to rule. But: “Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” “For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.” To allow himself to suffer the ignominy of being crucified made Jesus the weakest of the weak in the eyes of the world.
How do we respond to such weakness, such foolishness? By becoming
fools for Christ ourselves. This can take all sorts of manifestations, and it’s not always easy to spot. In some ways it’s easier to spot what it is not. The disciples arguing about which is the greatest among them is an example of being foolish in the bad sense of that term – they were just being silly as we always are when we try to pump up our own egos and seek for one-ups-manship on the other guy or gal. And so Jesus offers them the opportunity to become fools for him: “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” Not a very wise thing to do by worldly standards. And the disciples, as usual, just don’t get it. So, Jesus must show them. Here is a child – one who by his antics and by her seemingly inane phrases is just plain being foolish in adult eyes. But: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me…..” In other words, you need to regain that sense of childlikeness that allows you not to worry about becoming foolish, and then you will have taken Jesus into your hearts.
What can you do to become a holy fool? Nancy E. Topolewski tells one story about someone who fits that description:
“As Britain emerged from the carnage of the First World War, a priest of the Church of England named Dick Sheppard was assigned to one of the worst parishes in London: Saint Martin’s-in-the-Field. The lower-middle-class neighborhood was home, cheek-by-jowl, to prostitutes and tradespeople. Not an easy assignment.
“Sheppard hit the ground running. He got to know the prostitutes by name. He pulled unconscious drunks from the gutter and nursed them in his home. Ever so slowly, the parish began to change, as less-than-socially-acceptable people began to tip-toe into, then crowd into, the church.
“Because of, or perhaps in spite of, physical disability, Dick Sheppard was a driven man. He suffered from asthma, for which there was then no effective treatment. His physician counseled caution. Sheppard ignored the advice, with fatal consequences.
“Against doctors’ orders, one morning Dick Sheppard awakened before dawn and walked several miles, through the chill early-morning fog along the Thames River, to deliver a pair of soft leather gloves, purchased with his own money, to a man whose hands had been horribly burned in a factory accident the previous day. Why? Because Sheppard knew the man would lose his job if he failed to go to work. Dick Sheppard died, later that day, convinced that he was unworthy of his calling, and that his ministry had failed.
“Dick Sheppard was surely out of his mind. Why else would he deliberately ignore medical advice, go out into the chill and damp, and take gloves to a man who probably put nothing in the offering plate, if he came to church at all? Conventional wisdom would say, ‘Take care of Number One; no one else is worth it.’ But then, Dick Sheppard was a fool.”
Possibly none of us could or would do the kind of things Dick Sheppard did.
But we can look around and find our own brand of foolishness. Holy
foolishness. For, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the
wise.”
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
March 15, 2009